


summer surprised us

by ohmygodwhy



Series: first rule of earth kingdom fight club... [12]
Category: Avatar: The Last Airbender
Genre: Developing Friendships, Drinking & Talking, Gen, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Implied/Referenced Underage Drinking, Mid-Canon, POV Multiple, Sparring, featuring: sokka hating fire nation food toph beating ass and teens getting tipsy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-04
Updated: 2020-01-04
Packaged: 2021-04-21 15:49:06
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,100
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22089673
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ohmygodwhy/pseuds/ohmygodwhy
Summary: So yeah, she likes Zuko. Fucking sue her. She didn’t know him Before, like the others. The only Zuko she knows for herself is the one who’s way too easy to rile up, who carried her around and took Aang all the way to some ancient ruins and found some dragons with him. She likes that Zuko.She likes him even more when she finds out about the Underground Rumble tournaments.(three perspectives on the 'Zuko's Our Friend Now' Situation)
Relationships: Aang & Zuko (Avatar), Sokka & Zuko (Avatar), Toph Beifong & Zuko
Series: first rule of earth kingdom fight club... [12]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1280843
Comments: 144
Kudos: 3863





	summer surprised us

**Author's Note:**

> so i finished my annual atla rewatch yesterday (which is why this fic happened so fast) and was reminded how much i love the last half of s3 And how much we were robbed of zuko and toph interacting, esp since she was the one who vouched for him right off the bat like come on!! in my sister's words: zuko and toph's field trip wld have been committing crimes together. and she's right.
> 
> anyway, this has a kind of unintentional heavy tonal shift near the end bc i do not have writing consistency. also zuko and toph end up 'bonding thru trying to beat the shit out of each other' no matter which au it is and i think that's beautiful

i. sokka

So. Zuko is on their side now. Which, okay, Sokka can deal with. Even if Zuko did track them all the way to the North Pole and shoot fire at them on a regular basis. No big deal—he’s changed now, done a moral one-eighty, which Sokka can respect. And he has some pretty cool swords, too, and he helped Aang figure out how to firebend by dancing with actual dragons (which no, is he not jealous about, thanks). And there was the whole, you know, prison break thing.

So all in all, it’s not bad, having Zuko on their side. A little weird, at first, but not bad. Sokka only wishes he didn’t have to show off so much. 

He doesn’t think Zuko _ means _ to show off—the guy can’t be subtle so save his life, so they’d all know if he was trying. And it’s not like it’s a problem; he’s here because he’s a good enough bender to teach the Avatar. And he doesn’t really show that off. Okay, so maybe Sokka is only bothered by one thing. And maybe it’s kind of a dumb thing to be bothered by, but he can’t help it! He’s been traveling through the fire nation for months now, and he just has to say it: the food does not agree with him. 

So they’re in town on Ember Island, right, ‘cause there isn’t exactly any non-perishable food in Zuko’s family’s beach house, what with nobody really going there anymore. (There is a rather abundant liquor collection in the basement, but he, Zuko and Suki decided to keep that to themselves when they found it. Sixteen and up only, thanks very much.)

They stop at a street vendor, trying to save money by eating cheaper. Aang orders first, because he still insists that he’s well versed in Fire Nation culture despite bewildering every single Fire Nation citizen, including Zuko, that he tries his lingo on. He gets noodles, Katara gets a soup and then orders for Toph. 

Sokka orders noodles, too, and the guy peers at him over the counter. 

“You want hot or extra hot?”

Somehow, Sokka is always surprised by this question.

“Do you just have, uh… regular noodles?”

The vendor blinks at him, like he doesn’t understand the question. “I just said we have hot.”

“Uh, okay then, I’ll just... have some of that,” He reminds himself for the hundredth time: hot is the baseline in the fire nation. Which shouldn’t still surprise him—all the food they’ve gotten here has been flavorful, but he’s not really a spicy sort of person. It’s not that he can’t appreciate good food, it’s just that growing up in the ice and snow never really prepared his body for spicy food, you know? 

He glances over at Zuko, their resident fire nation expert, to ask if hot noodles are really the only kind of noodles they have here, but he pauses. Zuko is eating his without any hesitation—which, obviously he grew up eating this stuff, so of course he wouldn’t have a problem with it. Of course his baseline would be hot; maybe that’s how he fueled his rage while he was chasing them. 

Then, Zuko does the unthinkable: he goes and asks the vendor if he can have some extra hot sauce. The vendor shrugs, and hands him a bottle. Sokka watches in horror—discreetly, of course—as he just lathers the whole damn bowl in hot sauce. Like, the whole thing. All over it. And then he watches him eat it. He doesn’t even flinch when he bites into it, just sighs, all sated and satisfied. 

Fucking maniac. 

Well, he thinks to himself, if Zuko can do it, then so can he. He doesn’t want anyone—_ especially _ Zuko—thinking that he can’t eat a stupid meal just because it’s a little hot.

That being said, he gets about three bites in before he has to take a break. He thanks his past self for having the sense to order a drink, too, and has to stop himself before he gulps all of it down. 

Zuko pauses in his conversation with Toph—something about if it would be possible to combine their elements and make glass out of sand—and looks at him from across the table. 

“Are you okay?” He asks, eyebrows furrowed in concern. 

Sokka coughs into his hand (and immediately regrets it with his aching throat). “Yeah,” he says, maybe too quickly, “I’m fine.”

“Really? You look kinda flushed. Are you getting sick?”

And now everyone is looking at him—minus Toph, obviously, who has just tilted her head in his general direction. Suki is looking worried, now, too, but Katara has that knowing look in her eye that always vaguely pisses him off. 

“No, no, of course I’m not getting sick,” he tries to laugh, weakly, “Just ate a little too fast.”

Zuko blinks. Looks down at Sokka’s bowl and back up at his face, and then his eyes widen in realization. “Is it too hot?” He asks—and damn him, he sounds genuine and concerned enough that Sokka can’t even be mad at him for calling him out in front of everyone. 

“What? _ No _, it’s not too hot,” he flaps his hand as if he’s waving the question away, “I’m just... not used to it, is all.”

Zuko nods, and if it was anyone else, Sokka would think he was mocking him. But he isn’t. In fact, he looks downright understanding. 

“Fire Nation food is pretty hot, if you’re not used to it.”

Sokka rubs the back of his neck, a little sheepish under Zuko’s oddly sincere gaze.

“They didn’t have, y’know, a non-hot option.”

Zuko raises his eyebrow at him, tilts his head a little in confusion. Spirits, Sokka can barely believe this is the same person who was shooting fireballs at them six months ago. He seems so… soft, sometimes. 

“Yeah, they do.” Aang speaks up, also sounding confused. 

“You just have to ask for it without the broth.” Zuko explains, voice as rough as usual but surprisingly nonjudgmental, “That’s what makes it spicy—they flavor it.” 

“Oh,” Sokka says, suddenly feeling incredibly stupid. “But I asked if they had regular noodles! The guy said no!”

“Hot is regular.” Zuko says plainly. “You gotta specify.”

Sokka sputters for a moment, and finds he has nothing to say for himself. But hey, it’s not like anyone told him any of this! How was he supposed to know the bizarre Fire Nation street vendor rules?

There’s silence for a moment, and then Zuko says, “I can finish your bowl if you wanna get a new one. You know. Without broth.”

Sokka, not for the first time, cannot possibly reconcile this Zuko with the Old Zuko. He and Aang have talked about it, extensively—these weird differences. Aang told him the other day that Zuko let them take an entire half an hour break instead of their usual five, because Aang joked about feeling overheated. That Zuko had said it was an actual real dilemma a lot of firebenders faced when they worked themselves too hard—it had taken Zuko a week to recover when he did it to himself back on his ship, once. He made Aang sit down and drink water, even as Aang tried to tell him that he’d just been joking. The Old Zuko probably would’ve encouraged Aang to overheat himself into whatever trap he had laid that week. Weird shit. 

“Um,” he says, at a loss for a moment—and let it be known that Sokka is _ never _ at a loss for what to say, what with being incredibly quick witted and funny, “Yeah, sure. Thanks.”

Zuko shrugs, immediately reaching across the table to grab Sokka’s almost completely full bowl. “It’s no problem. Azula never really liked hot food, either—and didn’t like admitting it, so I’d ask for bland shit and then we’d trade.”

Sokka blinks. He doesn’t know how he feels about being compared to Zuko’s crazy scary sister, and doesn’t like how oddly human and, like, normal it makes her seem. He tries to think of a joke to make, maybe to annoy Zuko back into acting like his normal, easily annoyed self, but draws a blank. Over noodles. What the hell.

Toph, bless her heart, takes over for him. “Azula doesn’t like spicy food?” she laughs, “But she’s, like, the definition of spicy.”

“What the fuck?” And there Zuko goes again, cursing in front of two children—okay, Aang is really the only one who counts, given that Toph has just as bad a mouth as the prince, “A person can’t be spicy.”

“Uh, yeah they can. It’s like how you’re the definition of sparky, Sparky.”

“That doesn’t even make sense!” 

“Case in point—pop, pop, just like a fuckin’ firework.” 

Zuko scoffs, angrily picking up his chopsticks again instead of responding. Sokka stifles a laugh, and takes the opportunity to go order more noodles. 

Without the broth, this time. Obviously.

(Secretly, Sokka makes a note to get Zuko hot sauce or something for his birthday. He wonders how big of a bottle he can find. A Zuko-sized bottle, maybe? Spirits, the look on his face would be _ hilarious _.) 

ii. aang

Learning how to bend an element is something that most people will only experience once--if at all. So he’s not saying that it isn’t a gift and an honor to be able to learn four--of course it is! Despite being ‘pretty cool, even if bending is overrated’ according to Sokka, and ‘lucky to learn earthbending since it’s the best element’ according to Toph, it is, also, sometimes just a pain in the neck. 

Learning a new element is just _ hard_, unfortunately, even if you’re the Avatar. _ Especially _if you’re the Avatar, since you do in fact have to learn all four, and each one is the opposite to something else. 

Fire isn’t as difficult as earth was, thank the spirits, but it’s not coming to him the same way water did. 

He can tell that Zuko’s getting sort of, vaguely, trying-to-push-it-down annoyed with him, because they’ve been doing this same exercise for maybe an hour now and Aang still can’t get the movements quite right. They’ve gotten the essence of their firebending back, thanks to their field trip, but understanding the essence of fire isn’t the same as being able to actually use it. At least for him; Zuko seems to be doing fine, back to his old, firecrackery self. Spirits, Aang is so glad he’s on their side now. 

“You need to stop being afraid of it,” Zuko tells him.

“I’m not afraid of it,” Aang only half-lies. 

“Then you need to be more afraid of it.”

“What? How does that even make sense!”

Zuko huffs out another quick, vaguely annoyed breath, presses his fingers between his eyes the way that Aang has noticed Zuko does when he’s frustrated or embarrassed and trying not to show it. He takes a deep breath and puts a hand out in front of him, because Aang has also noticed that Zuko gestures a lot when he talks — which means this is gonna be important firebending info.

“Fire’s a dangerous element, yeah?” he starts, “Everyone knows that.”

“Yeah,” Aang agrees.

“So, you need to be aware of that. And you need to — I guess not fear, necessarily — but you need to have… respect for it. You need to respect the element, and try to… embody it? It’s like ‘be the rock’. But with fire.”

Aang perks up at that last bit, after listening very intently to the rest of it. “Did Toph tell you that?”

“Tell me what?”

“‘Be the rock’,” Aang parrots back. 

“Why would Toph tell me that?”

Aang blinks, “I don’t know, it’s what she told me, back when she started teaching me to earthbend.”

“She never taught me how to earthbend,” Zuko says, taking a moment to reach for one of the cups of water they brought with them. “But I talked with one a while back — an earthbender, I mean. He gave me pointers on how to fight better — told me that if you wanna beat rock, you have to be it.” 

Aang is suddenly very interested in Zuko’s mysterious earthbending friend, and what rock he was telling Zuko how to beat, exactly.

“You were fighting earthbenders?” Aang asks. 

Zuko, all mysterious as he is, just shrugs. “A few.” 

“Um. Why?”

“To get better at it.”

Aang blinks. Huh. Makes sense, but somehow also answers none of his questions at all. 

Before he can ask anything else, Zuko claps his hands together, once, to get them focused again. The sound echoes in enclosed little stone courtyard they’re training it. 

“So, the same principles apply. Find the core traits of the element — earth is stubborn, and doesn’t move easily. What is fire?”

“It’s,” Aang thinks for a moment, back to the Sun Warriors and the trek up the mountain, “It’s living. And it’s moving. And growing.” 

“It doesn’t have to grow,” Zuko counters gently, and he almost sounds like Katara explaining something patiently, “Not if you control it. It’s living, and it’s moving, and it’ll do whatever it wants if you let it control you instead.”

“So,” Aang thinks about the earth, and grounding yourself against it, “if you wanna control fire, you have to move it yourself. You have to be stubborn, like with earth, but you have to be able to move.” 

“Yeah,” Zuko says, and it seems like he almost might be smiling — smiling like he’s proud of him, which makes Aang smile, too; he likes the feeling of understanding something, of having things click in place and work out. He likes the feeling of people being proud of him—especially his friends. “Yeah. Fire needs to move, ‘cause it needs to burn. But you can’t let it burn too hot.”

“And you can’t let it burn out — like the fire we had to carry up that mountain.” 

Zuko looks at him, appraising, and Aang tries not to preen under it. Zuko doesn’t seem to be impressed by much; this is a rare moment. “You’re a smart kid,” he says. “Try the drill again.”

Aang tries the drill again. He thinks about the earth and about the way he’s seen Zuko’s fire move when Zuko moves, and it goes much better than it did before. 

They’re on the third drill by dinner time, and Aang decides that learning firebending isn’t nearly as bad as earth was. Toph will “kick his ass for that later,” as she so delicately puts it when he tells her over the fire Zuko has him light for dinner, but it makes Zuko smile at him, something small and rare, so Aang decides it’s worth it. 

iii. toph

Toph decides, first day, point blank, that she likes Zuko. Not because of his intro speech--that whole thing was awful and kind of embarrassing in that train wreck can’t-stop-watching type of way--but because of how bold it was for him to walk right up to the people who had been his enemies for the better part of however long it’s been and tell them, straight up, that he wanted to teach the avatar how to firebend. 

That shit? Takes guts. Takes guts to throw everything away—from what she’s heard, an everything he’s worked damn hard for—and take that big of a risk. A special kind of stubborn to stick around after they say no. 

Mostly, though, she likes him ‘cause he sticks to their deal of ‘you have to carry me around until my feet heal because you’re the one that fucked them up’. She gets tired of giving him shit about it after the first three times, because he sounds so guilty and sincere in his apologies that it actually makes her feel kind of bad about it. Makes her. _ Toph _ . Feel _ bad _ about making fun of him. For burning _her_ feet! It takes a special kind of person to make Toph feel bad about something. She doesn’t know how much she likes that, but whatever! Zuko makes a good palanquin ride. 

(“I’ve never ridden a palanquin before,” she says when he makes the comparison. 

“I thought you were nobility,” Zuko says, not bothering to elaborate on where exactly he got that info. All her friends are snitches. Not that she’s embarrassed about it. Now that Zuko’s here, she’s not the only one who was raised in dumb-as-shit high society.

Still, shrugs. “Yeah. But my parents were super protective of me. They didn’t want anyone to know I _ existed _—so it’s not like they paraded me around in a damn palanquin.”

Zuko is silent for a moment. She wonders what his face looks like, if he’s confused or understanding or, worst of all, pitying. She would rather die than be pitied—her parents have done nothing but pity her all her life. 

But when Zuko talks, he doesn’t sound pitying. “You weren’t really missing out. They’re super slow, and it’s weird knowing people are carrying you. Way faster to just walk.” 

Toph hums, hiding her strange sense of relief. “I wouldn’t like not feeling the ground, anyways.” 

“You don’t feel the ground when I carry you,” Zuko points out.

“Yeah, but I know you. I know you won’t drop me.” 

She doesn’t know where that came, and from Zuko’s surprised silence, he doesn’t know either. This has gotten way too sincere and oddly vulnerable for her taste, so she does what she does best, and punches him. It lands somewhere on his arm—near the bend of his elbow, she feels. 

He curses, surprised. “The hell was that for?”

She laughs—Katara would have his ass for all that Bad Language; spirits know she gets on Toph’s ass for it enough as it is. 

“I felt like it. Now, take me to the fountain.”

“That’s way across the temple!”

“Then you better start moving.”)

By the time her feet have healed, she thinks that they’ve become pretty solid friends. And she doesn’t say that about just anyone—it took a while for her to really trust Katara the way she does now, the two of them so fundamentally different in the way they think and act and see the world. Katara has such a rigid moral code when it comes to things like cheating and, you know, having fun. She bets Zuko would’ve been totally on board with her Runaway act if he’d been there. Wasn’t he the Blue Spirit? 

Point is, Toph doesn’t make friends easily, but when she does, she cherishes them. Not in a soft way, _ obviously _—she doesn’t coddle them like Katara does or hold them all together like Aang, but she does care for them, in her own way. She likes to think she keeps them safe. 

So yeah, she likes Zuko. Fucking sue her. She didn’t know him Before, like the others. The only Zuko she knows for herself is the one who’s way too easy to rile up, who carried her around and took Aang all the way to some ancient ruins and found some dragons with him. She likes that Zuko.

She likes him even more when she finds out about the Underground Rumble tournaments.

She makes the first connection when Aang is telling her about the training he did with Zuko that day—he was all excited about it, so she couldn’t find it in her to be bored. Even though she kind of is, until he says: “Oh yeah! I was gonna tell you—he told me to be the rock!” Like that’s supposed to make sense to her.

“Huh?” She asks.

“Y’know, ‘be the rock’. Like you said back when you were first teaching me. He said to move the fire you have to embody it—like how to earthbend, you have to embody the earth.”

“Who told him how to earthbend?” She asks, curious despite herself. 

She thinks Aang shrugs, “An earthbender, apparently. He said he… fought some, I think? For some reason. I don’t know, he’s always pretty vague when he talks about himself.”

Toph snorts, “He’s not all that mysterious. You just think he is ‘cause you’re too afraid to ask him things straight up.”

Aang flushes, “I am not. I just don’t like to pry.”

“You sayin’ I’m nosy?” She asks, crossing her arms—a beat, and she grins to let him know she’s not serious. She knows her sense of humor can differ from his sometimes. 

“Absolutely,” Aang says. Maybe she’s taught him to be a little too bold with her. She tells him he’ll pay for that when they practice later, and he just laughs.

She hears about it the second time from Sokka, after they get back from their mysterious hunting trip-turned-prison break. It’s after Sokka and his dad have spent the entirety of dinner recounting the whole thing, complete with sound effects from Sokka and a bit of commentary from Suki and Zuko (he rolls his eyes when Sokka talks about how he almost ‘fell to his death jumping after the gondola’ and says that he obviously knew Sokka would catch him--to which Sokka makes a sort of cooing sound and says that is so sweet; there is that moment of silence where Toph assumes that Zuko has flipped him off).

Sokka pulls her aside afterwards, when everyone else is cleaning up, vibrating with that post-win energy he gets after something finally goes right for them.

“I almost forgot to ask--did you know Zuko was in one of those underground fight club things?” he asks, his voice reminiscent of Aang’s. 

Toph perks up, surprised but also not very surprised--more like glad to be proven right. 

“For real?” she says, trying not to sound too excited.

“For real,” Sokka confirms, “We ran into one of his... fighting buddies?... at the Boiling Rock. It was super weird, but in hindsight he does seem like the type of person to do that.”

“And what ‘type of person’ is that?” Toph asks, crossing her arms, ‘cause she doesn’t exactly like his tone. That’s literally _ where _ they met her.

“Nothing bad,” Sokka sputters, “Just… you know, that type. Like you. That’s why I wanted to ask.”

Toph can appreciate that, because she did want to know. She’s never thought much about what Zuko was like before all this, because she knows he and the others have a rough history, but she is suddenly very interested in that unknown stretch of time between the North Pole and Ba Sing Se, when nobody knew where he was. 

She stores these bits of info away until she gets the chance to bring it up. She’s not afraid of confrontation, but she does understand priorities. 

They’re all taking an afternoon to themselves, mostly for Aang’s benefit—even the Avatar needs to relax sometimes—and she finds Zuko out on the far side of the temple where no one really comes, legs crossed, out in the sun. She knows his head is tilted back, like he’s trying to soak up as much sunlight as he can, because that’s the way she feels when she touches the earth for the first time after riding on Appa for too long. 

“Hey,” she says, walking in loud enough not to startle him. Usually, she thinks it’s funny to sneak up on people—Sokka, especially—but the first time she did it, Zuko’s heart didn’t stop racing for a solid five minutes. The sparky, firecracker way it hammered in his chest made her tense, like his anxiety was contagious. 

He takes a moment to take one last long breath, and then twists his body to look at her. Zuko does most things with his entire body—it makes him fun to annoy, fun to stay extra still and feel the way his stance widens as he briefly becomes whatever emotion he’s feeling. He might be one of the easiest people to read that she’s ever met—and she’s friends with Katara.

“Hey,” he says. A pause. “Is something wrong?”

“Something doesn’t need to be wrong for me to talk to you.”

“I guess not.” Another pause. “What’s up?

Toph grins, and plops down next to him, “I have a question for you.”

“Sure.”

“Which Rumble did you fight in?”

If Zuko is surprised that she knows this little tidbit, he doesn’t show it. Just sighs, resigned. “Sokka told you?”

“Yeah,” she nods, “So which one?”

“Uh, mostly Garsai. When I was traveling without my uncle. Someone told me about those underground fighting things.”

“The Rumbles,” she reminds him, not bothering to contain her excitement, “I thought they were just for earthbending.”

“Not that one,” he says, all casual, “It was mostly earthbenders, but there were a few waterbenders.”

“And how many firebenders?”

“Just me.” 

“How many rounds did you fight?”

“Four.”

“How many did you win?”

Zuko considers for a moment. “Two.”

“Two out of four,” she nods to herself, impressed despite trying not to be, “Not bad for a firebender. Why tournaments, though? I woulda thought you were trying not to get caught.”

She feels Zuko shrug, sleeve brushing against her arm, “I wanted to, I dunno, learn more, I guess. Get better at everything—I didn’t have experience fighting earthbenders, so I just took the opportunity.”

She imagines Zuko getting his ass kicked by earthbenders two out of four times for Learning Experience. What a maniac. A kindred spirit.

“I was reigning champion in mine,” she boasts, pointing at herself. “Earth Rumble in Gaoling, the Blind Bandit reigned supreme.” 

Zuko makes a vague _ hm _sound of approval. “Wow,” he says, voice soft and impressed, “Is that how Aang found you?”

“Yeah,” she laughs, “Blew me off the stage and stole my crown, damn cheater.”

Zuko huffs something that could be a laugh, if she doesn’t compare it to her own, and then pauses, like he’s considering something. “Gaoling… I think I was there for a night or two. I went to watch the tournament, since I couldn’t actually participate, but I thought someone recognized me, so I left.”

“Damn!” Toph exclaims, throwing her hands up in disappointment, “You coulda seen me kick ass!” 

“I see you kick ass everyday.”

“Yeah, but kicking Aang’s ass isn’t the same as taking down those big muscle-y dudes.” 

“You kick Sokka’s ass, too,” Zuko offers. Toph laughs, loudly. He’s much more relaxed, out here like this, more willing to shit talk and be an actual teenager than the way he sits, back ramrod straight around the fire and under Katara’s gaze. Like he has to prove he’s good enough to be here, when all Sokka does is complain and Katara is constantly her usual bossy self. He bites back, sometimes, but only when he’s gotten all worked up. And he apologizes, a lot, which is kind of annoying. She likes him better when he’s being a little bit of an asshole, because she is also a little bit of an asshole. 

“Sokka doesn’t even count.”

He does that kind-of-laugh again. Suddenly, a wonderful idea pops into her head.

“You said you fought all those earthbenders to learn, right?” 

She feels Zuko turn to look at her, “Yeah.”

“You’ve got the best earthbender in the world right here. Wanna test what you’ve learned?”

She can hear the smile in his voice, the way his body perks up. “Oh, shit, I didn’t even think of that. Hell yeah.”

She grins back.

They decide to go at it right here—better to keep it as far away from Katara as possible. They stand opposite from each other, Zuko with his arms close to his body, his feet planted firm on the ground (like an earthbender, she thinks, like he really did learn something from them; this is gonna be fun). 

“You ready to get your ass beat?”

Zuko laughs—for real, this time, something more than that sad little huff. “I’ve kinda missed it, to be honest.” He pauses, as if doubting for the first time, “Are you sure about this? I don’t wanna—I don’t wanna burn you again.”

Toph scoffs, “You caught me by surprise that time. Just don’t go for my feet again and we’ll be fine.”

“I could hurt you.”

“You couldn’t hurt me.” She says, because she knows that he couldn’t—that he wouldn’t try. She isn’t maliciously hurting Aang when she trains him. Sparring injuries don’t count like that.

“If you say so,” he says, but she can still hear him smiling. 

She folds into her stance. He tightens his. There is a moment where they are both completely still. And then he moves. 

(They go for three rounds—he puts up a good fight, but she does, as promised, beat his ass every time. They show up for dinner panting, exhausted and hungry as hell. She asks if he wants to go again tomorrow, and he says only if she doesn’t hold back this time. She laughs, loud and unrestrained, and says you’re on, Sparky.)

  
  
iv. sokka, again, to bookend it

Sokka has got to say: for an evil maniac dictator, Firelord Ozai has a pretty good taste in alcohol. Not that Sokka has much experience, per say—he was never really old enough for more than a few sips of wine back home, and he wasn’t gonna be a bad example to the others while they traveled. But whatever it is that’s hiding in the beach house basement? It’s good.

“It’s mostly sake,” Zuko says, and Sokka realizes that he’s been speaking out loud. “I tell you this every time, man.” 

Sokka lets out a deep breath. “Oh yeah. My brain is, like. Slippery right now.”

Zuko snorts. “Spirits, you’re a fuckin’ lightweight.”

When Zuko is drunk, Sokka has discovered over the last few weeks, his mouth gets somehow dirtier than it already is. Which is saying something. Sure, he’s been trying to tone it down now that he’s spending time around people younger than him, but he’s not exactly the shining example of self control. 

“‘M not a lightweight,” Sokka sniffs, “I’ve been building my tolerance.”

“You can’t build an alcohol tolerance in three weeks, Sokka.”

It kind of sounds like Zuko’s laughing at him, even though there’s no laughter actually coming out. Smug asshole. 

“Whatever. Why do you have a higher tolerance than me—you’re _ barely _ older.”

Zuko shrugs, loose and weightless—alcohol unscrews Zuko’s joints, lifts the pressure off his shoulders. He isn’t wound up so tight, isn’t so tense and ready to jump into action. Alcohol makes Sokka feel much the same—he’s been constantly on edge for the better part of a year now, always looking over his shoulder or straining to look ahead. He thinks that Zuko’s been this way for much longer. The thought of being Zuko is utterly exhausting. He doesn’t know how the guy does it.

“I lived on a ship with a bunch of discharged sailors for three years. You build a tolerance for these things.”

“Spirits, you started drinking when you were, what, thirteen?” The idea of a drunk Aang—or worse, a drunk Toph—is terrifying. 

Zuko rolls his eyes, “Don’t be stupid. Uncle would’ve killed me—I was fourteen.”

“Your uncle let you drink?”

Zuko actually laughs at that, the kind of laugh he only ever lets out here. He doesn’t know if anyone’s heard him laugh like that, other than him and Suki—who isn’t here tonight, too tired for it. She was the one who had made the discovery, actually, three days into their stay on the island. She had showed Sokka, who immediately went to Zuko about it, practically ready to beg for permission to take some, before he remembered that Zuko didn’t actually, like, own the place. Still, Zuko had said he didn’t really care, but that maybe it wouldn’t be a good idea to spread the word about it. 

Somehow, it had turned into a little ritual they did sometimes, the three of them. They’re the oldest of the group—sometimes it’s a tough job. And really, it would be a tragedy to let perfectly good liquor go to waste. 

“Fuck no,” Zuko says, “There was this mechanic—shit mechanic, by the way—who thought the best way to cheer me up would be to ‘teach me how to have some fuckin’ fun’. We’d play _Ships and Robbers_ and turn it into a drinking game.” 

At fourteen, Sokka had been building his watch tower out of snow and trying to teach six year olds how to prepare for battle. Instead of voicing this, he chooses to make fun of his friend.

“Does your uncle know about this, young man?” Sokka wishes he had his fake beard to stoke.

“If you tell my uncle, he will actually murder me,” Zuko says, dead serious. 

“I will carry your secret to my grave,” Sokka promises, matching his tone. 

A moment, two, and Sokka bursts out laughing. Zuko buries his own laughter in his cup, but Sokka sees the smile. 

“Spirits, your life is weird. No wonder you were so nuts back then.”

Zuko actually looks offended—and he sounds even more offended, “I wasn’t nuts.”

“Uh, you kinda were,” Sokka counters, tilting his cup at him accusingly, “You literally dragged Aang through a snowstorm. You almost killed yourself to capture him, dude.”

Zuko scoffs, even as he flushes in what’s probably embarrassment—he does that a lot, when someone brings up his Questionable Past. If you told Sokka six months ago that someday soon he’d be making jokes about all the times Prince Zuko chased them down and almost captured Aang, he would’ve thought you were crazy. 

“I wouldn’t have died,” Zuko says, so utterly and completely sure of himself it kinda blows Sokka away, “In a fucking snowstorm? No way.” 

To be fair, back then Sokka had been hinging on the fact that Zuko would not let himself die in that snowstorm. 

“Okay, well what about that time you hired that lady with the whip and that weird rat monster? That was crazy.”

“That was smart. I didn’t have to track you myself at all.”

“Okay, fair point, fair point.” 

Zuko raises his cup in victory, and then downs the rest of his sake. He is still far too put together for Sokka’s taste, especially in comparison to him, so he holds out the bottle to top him off and Zuko wordlessly holds out his cup to let him. 

“Ugh,” Sokka laments, still caught up on the Zuko-and-Sokka-at-fourteen comparison. “My life is so boring compared to yours.”

Zuko blinks at him, slowly. “You literally found the Avatar and then traveled the world with him. And planned an invasion and then actually _ invaded _ the Fire Nation. And remember your moon girlfriend? And the prison break? Highest security prison in the Fire Nation? Or did I dream that shit up?”

Sokka waves the compliments away even as he preens under them. “I mean before that—like, I spent fifteen years in the South Pole doing jack shit. You were sailing around the world and drinking sake with sailors.” 

“They actually preferred vodka,” Zuko says, “And rum. But who the fuck cares? I wasn’t ‘sailing around the world’ because I wanted to. I was in exile. As in, I literally could not go home.”

“I know what exile means,” Sokka says, frowning. And then the rest of his words take a moment to sink in. “Wait, for how long?”

“Uh, three years? Like I said?”

“You got kicked out when you were thirteen?” Which sounds kind of rude once he says it, but he can’t take it back. Sokka had known that Zuko was banished—he’d heard Zhao mention it, and then Azula, but he hadn’t known it had been that long.

Zuko’s easy postures tightens up, shoulders drawing up like wire. “Yeah. So what?”

“’So what’?” Sokka parrots back, “So, that’s crazy! What’d you even do to get exiled at thirteen?” 

Sokka, even in his tipsy state, kind of immediately regrets asking. The air in the room gets a little bit colder, like Zuko brings it down with him. If Zuko was a little more sober, Sokka is sure he’d be snapping at him to mind his business—maybe leaving. As it is, though, he is doing none of those things. Instead, he just looks at Sokka, gaze serious, if a bit glazed from the alcohol. 

“I don’t think you want to know.” He says, voice calm. 

Sokka swallows. He thinks Zuko might be right. He also thinks that he needs to know, now. He’s always had a curious mind—if Zuko doesn’t tell him now, the secrecy of it will bother him until he finds out. 

Still. Zuko is his friend. He doesn’t want to push him away, or make him do anything he doesn’t wanna do. He likes to think he’s grown a lot over the past year, matured and become more aware, emotionally, of the people around him. Having Katara as a sister has helped. And he’s known Aang long enough to know where to stop and start. Zuko, for all that they’ve done together and all the times they’ve gotten tipsy in the basement, is still largely unknown to him. 

He thinks he needs to change that.

“I think I do,” he finally says. 

Zuko’s expression shutters, and he lowers his eyes to his cup. The silence drags on for long enough that Sokka starts to doubt.

“You don’t have to—“

“I said some dumb shit in a war meeting I wasn’t supposed to be at.”

For a moment, Sokka thinks Zuko is joking. His lips curl into a smile and he’s ready to laugh and call his bluff, until he sees the look on his friend’s face. There’s none of that dry amusement Sokka has gotten to know. Zuko is not joking.

“Are you kidding?” Is all Sokka manages to say, even though he knows he’s not.

Zuko does smile, now, but it’s a small, bitter thing. He shakes his head, just a bit. “No. I disrespected an important general. Disrespected my father, in front of—in front of the whole fucking court. I was young and stupid.”

“But you were a _ child _,” Sokka says, surprising himself with the conviction in his voice. The anger there.

Zuko nods. “I was a child. But my father is not the kind of man who has mercy for children.”

One of Zuko’s hands leaves his cup to reach up and trace the edges of his—of his scar. Sokka’s stomach drops. He suddenly feels much more sober than he did a few minutes ago. 

“Zuko,” he says, voice wavering. It can’t be what he’s thinking. He just misunderstood. 

Zuko swallows, bends one knee and props his arm up. Casual, like he’s talking about the weather or something else equally as worthless. Zuko looks at him sidelong, considering, and then just. Shrugs.

“My father is not the kind of man who has mercy for children,” he repeats, “His lessons were harsh, and I was a very slow learner. This was his final lesson,” and he traces the scar again, slow and steady, and it looks more like a hand, a brand, than a scar. “And I finally learned.” 

Sokka thinks he might be sick. “That’s not... Zuko, that’s not...” that’s not right, he wants to say, that’s not fair, that’s horrible, that’s not how you teach a child a lesson.

“I know,” Zuko says, even though Sokka can’t finish his sentence. “I do know. It took me a long,” he sucks in a breath, “long time to realize that. But, I know.”

“You thought it was your fault.” Sokka’s voice is small. 

“He was my father. He was the Firelord. He was... he was just _ right _, and everything he did was right. I know that’s not true now, but. What else was I supposed to think?” He shakes his head, “And he was my father. He burned me and sent me away, but he was my father.”

Sokka understands. He thinks about his own father—hurting him, or hurting _ Katara _, and he just… can’t imagine it. He knows his father would never hurt either of them. Can’t imagine a father doing that to his child. 

And yet. And yet. Zuko sits in front of him, with a scar on his face shaped like a hand. Fucking Fire Nation. Fucking Firelord. Sokka wants to be furious—is furious, on some level, but he is also so tired. This thing that he’s pulled to the surface, this horrible fact—it’s heavy, it’s his mom’s death kind of heavy, it’s Aang’s people being wiped out kind of heavy. He barely knows how to carry those.

“Zuko, I’m,” he starts, and stops, doesn’t know what to say or how to say it. “That’s so fucked up.”

_ Spirits, Sokka, _ he thinks, squeezing his eyes shut. They snap back open when he hears Zuko’s surprised laugh. 

“Yeah,” he agrees, “Pretty much everything is kinda fucked up right now. That’s why we’re here.” 

“Yeah, I guess it is. I just… I’m sorry.”

Zuko blinks at him, “Why are you sorry? You didn’t do it.”

Sokka shakes his head, setting his cup aside to reach, impulsive and full of sake and a heavy, heavy grief, “I’m sorry that happened to you. And I’m sorry that he’s your father. And I’m very glad you’re here.”

Zuko’s eyebrows furrow together, like he doesn’t understand what he’s hearing, but he nods all the same. It makes Sokka want to shake him until he realizes that there are people who give a shit about him that aren’t his uncle, but neither of them have the capacity for that conversation right now. 

Somehow, Zuko smiles at him. “Thank you,” he says, and he sounds tired and sincere.

Somehow, Sokka smiles back. “Of course.”

Zuko’s life is fucking crazy and so is Sokka’s and pretty much everything is kinda fucked up right now but that’s why they’re all here. To fix it. To change it. 

If Sokka ever gets close enough to Ozai to punch the guy right in the face, he vows, then he’s gonna go for it. On Yue’s good name, he’s gonna fuckin’ deck him. 

He says this to Zuko, who laughs louder than Sokka’s ever heard him laugh before, and Sokka thinks that maybe things will be okay. They will take the world and fix it and change it, and things will be okay.

**Author's Note:**

> u know the board game battleship? imagine 'ships and robbers' is like that but with pirates
> 
> anyway. one more week till the next semester starts, haven't gotten my textbooks yet so we love that for me! comment to help me get my shit together and happy 2020


End file.
